What Is Junk Food

1. What Is Junk Food?

By junk food we mean foods that have been so altered and impaired in the process of manufacturing, bleaching, canning, cooking, preserving, pickling, etc., that they are no longer as well fitted to meet the needs of the body as they were in the state Nature prepared them.

Let’s face it, we can’t improve upon Nature! But people still insist on trying and the results are disastrous. When we attempt to alter any food by adding or subtracting components or by heating or freezing, we are degrading that food to the extent to which we alter it. Nature prepared our foods perfectly suitable for our consumption in their whole unchanged state. When these food items are changed or altered in any way, they become denatured junk. Disease is the inevitable result from eating such foods.

1.1 Foods Must Be In Their Whole State

Numerous animal experiments have shown that, while proteins, carbohydrates and fats are food elements, they are not in and by themselves food. Junk foods usually contain excessive amounts of the above named food constituents and little else. For example, candy would be almost purely carbohydrate. Butter (according to our definition this is a junk food) would be a pure fat.

It has been established that a diet that contains enough nourishment, by all the recognized chemical standards, still fails to support normal growth and physiological normality, if it lacks some unknown substances. Very little of these substances need to be present, but there is an irreducible minimum. This would consist of the many vitamin and mineral elements, enzymes, etc. which are only available in usable form in whole raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.

The refining, preserving and cooking processes to which our foods are subjected destroy the delicate constituents in our foods. In fact, the cooking process robs foods of so much of their value that most people feel that they must add salt, spices and various condiments to them to make them palatable.

1.2 Food Constituents Must Be Organic

We need to consume our food in its whole state, for in this form we can readily assimilate all the nutrients which we derive from that food. When foods are fragmented and certain vitamins or minerals are added in an inorganic form, that food loses its value. Any food so deranged is truly a junk food.

The addition of one or more vitamins to such denatured foods would not render them adequate.

Vitamins and minerals never work independently of each other but synergistically for the benefit of the whole organism. When there is either a lack of calcium or an excess of acid in the food, Vitamin A has no effect. It is known that mineral salts are not assimilated in the absence of the vitamins and both are spoiled by cooking. Most junk foods (if not all) which are commonly sold in stores have undergone some cooking.

Minerals which are returned to the junk foods are inorganic and therefore unusable by the body. Sodium chloride, for example, is not assimilable or usable by the body. It is excreted unchanged. It comes out in the same state it entered the body. No metabolizable food does this. Sodium chloride is not a food but an irritant. This is true of all inorganic minerals and salts. They are useless, supply the body with nothing and are toxic.

Dr. Shelton says, “We have not learned to make, nor even to imitate living substances. We know that animals are dependent upon plants for their food and cannot go directly to the soil for it. We can neither synthesize these substances in the laboratory, nor can we tear them down in the kitchen or in the laboratory in “purifying” them (extracting their salts from them) without greatly impairing their food values.”

Nature gave us apples, pears, cabbage, celery, lettuce, oranges, nuts, etc. and not vitamins, minerals as such. All our food needs are found in neat little packages and when consumed in this form, we do not have to concern ourselves with food deficiencies. All of our needs will be met most adequately.